


hotel california

by silentwalrus



Series: caveat emptor [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Petsitting: xXxtreme Edition, Snakes, Well just one, his life is very stupid in a lot of very dangerous ways, it’s a bad week to try and assassinate roy mustang, post-canon if you’re into THAT, pre-slash if you’re into that, slice of life only the life is roy mustang’s, so it’s wall to wall politics machination murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:20:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24763744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: The phone in Roy’s study ringing on a Sunday evening isn’t out of the ordinary, especially given the month he’s had, but Edward being on the other end of the line definitely is. “Yo, Mustang.”
Series: caveat emptor [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790881
Comments: 149
Kudos: 912





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to jinlinli, gracelesso and aetataureate for helping me title these!

The phone in Roy’s study ringing on a Sunday evening isn’t out of the ordinary, especially given the month he’s had, but Edward being on the other end of the line definitely is. “Yo, Mustang.” 

“How did you get this number?” 

“Hawkeye, how else? Anyway, you can have pets in your, like, house, right? Like, according to your lease?” 

“No,” Roy lies automatically, feeling prescient, alarmed and very doomed. 

“Well, too bad,” Ed says, which was clearly going to be his reply regardless of what answer Roy gave. “Because I’m across the street and I have a new friend for your next two weeks.” 

_“Absolutely_ not,” Roy says immediately. “Edward, you can’t just -” 

“What? What’s that? You’re breaking up,” Ed says, and then there’s just the dial tone. 

Shortly followed by the doorbell. Roy considers not opening it, but that just means Ed will come in through the window. _“No,”_ Roy stresses, opening the door. “You can’t just _Elric what the hell is that.”_

“This is Luggy,” Ed says, patting the _massive fucking snake_ draped over and around his shoulders. “Lady Lugnuts, technically. Though mostly I call her Luggage.” 

The snake is bright yellow, long enough to hang down well past Ed’s waist and easily as thick around as Roy’s thigh. “That does _not_ answer my _question,”_ Roy says tersely. He’d been expecting a _cat._

“She’s a banana python,” Ed says equably. “She’s Winry’s. Ling sent it. S’a thank you gift for doing Lan Fan’s arm.” 

Sending eighty pounds of carnivorous reptile as a gratitude gift does sound like the Dragon Emperor, but for once this is certainly not _Roy’s_ problem. “You want to put _that_ in _my house_ for _two weeks?”_

“Yeah, she needs the room. And Hawkeye has Hayate and nobody else has the space or is kind of a wimp,” Ed says vaguely. “And Winry’s in Aquroya until the twelfth, so.” 

“What possible chain of logic led you to conclude that _I_ should be the person to take care of it?” Roy demands, temporarily ignoring the fact that Ed is apparently on first name terms with Riza’s dog. 

“You have a house,” Ed says in his speaking to idiots voice. “A big one. And she doesn’t need, like, supervision or anything, you feed her like once a week and she just chills in a warm spot the rest of the time. She’s practically a vegetable.”

“Then why does she ‘need room’?” Roy demands. 

“She likes to stretch out every once in a while,” Ed says, unperturbed. “She’s kinda big.”

“I’d _noticed.”_

“Eighteen feet,” Ed says appreciatively. A poisonously yellow head rises over his shoulder, tongue flickering. “Aw, see? She’s saying hi.” Roy highly fucking doubts it. “She likes you.” 

Roy highly fucking doubts that also. The head quests further down Ed’s clavicle, larger than Roy’s hand. “Edward. I cannot take care of this animal,” Roy says unequivocally. 

"What, is it the rat thing? Look, if that’s a problem, she can find her own food,” Ed says, as if this is meant to be reassuring. “Like, if you had mice, you won't anymore.” 

“Rat thing? _What_ rat thing? And I do not have _mice.”_

Ed eyeballs Roy’s house skeptically. “Old pre-Reform place like this? Steam heating? Yeah, you have mice.” 

Roy _does not_ have mice, half because he lives off takeout and there’s nothing for mice to eat and half because if he did Chris would behead him, but the mouse question is currently taking a far back seat to the rats. “What _rat thing?”_

“Oh, it’s just what she eats. I mean, rabbit too, but you gotta keep them alive and those you gotta feed every day. I figured this would be easier.” He pats the snake’s hide. “Here, I’ll show you.” 

With that Ed lifts the snake off his shoulders, bends down and places the thing on Roy’s porch. He also unslings a backpack, but Roy’s preoccupied with noticing that the snake somehow looks even bigger against the backdrop of Roy’s tulip-patterned welcome mat than it had sitting on Ed’s shoulders like the world’s most upsetting shawl.

“She doesn’t eat super often, but rats are actually more of a snack than a meal at her size, so like, every three days you can offer her one and see if she wants it,” Ed is saying. The snake’s head drifts up towards Roy’s ankle, tongue wiggling. Roy is not going to move his foot. He is not. There were glasshead rattlers and sand vipers in Ishval that liked to go looking for warm bedrolls on cold desert nights, and those were always best handled by keeping your cool, moving slowly and making sure the animal didn’t see a threat in you. Of course, all of _those_ snakes had weighed maybe two pounds at maximum. The narrowest point on this thing’s whole body is as thick as Roy’s calf. If a venomous snake bites you, you can apply an antivenom. If an eighteen foot long python crushes your ribcage, however, you are faced with a slightly different set of resuscitative options. 

“- and if you want to give her a treat you can take her for a swim,” Ed continues. Roy wonders just what expression on his face is indicating to Ed that he would like to treat this creature to anything but an eviction. “Just fill up your bathtub and she’ll climb in if she wants a soak. She’s super easy, really. Not a petting kind of pet.” He grins at Roy. “I figured it’d be just your speed.” 

“What is this even revenge for,” Roy says outright instead of paying attention to the slow yellow slide happening somewhere much too close to his ankle. “We haven’t spoken in months. Is this because of the arts classes? Surely the poetry can’t have been _that_ bad -”

“What? No, poetry’s great. What are you even - this isn’t _revenge,_ bastard,” Ed says exasperatedly. “I need a friend to watch her for a couple weeks and you fit the bill. I’m even paying and everything.”

“Pay an animal boarder instead,” Roy says immediately. 

“I’m not paying with _money._ You get a favor, two weeks’ snakesitting worth,” Ed says. “Besides, hardly anywhere does snakes, nowhere does really big ones and all the pet places I called and offered bribes to want you to book like a week beforehand.”

“And you think _I’m_ going to be more bribable?” Roy demands. 

Ed just looks at him. 

The urge to argue that he is not more corrupt than some chihuahua sitter is not a helpful one. “Can’t you take it… wherever you’re going,” Roy tries. 

“Nope,” Ed says cheerfully. “Me and Al got hired for the whole, y’know, Bridgeport thing, we’re getting on the train tonight.” 

Bridgeport, where the latest earthquake collapsed half the lower canyons, four out of five major bridges and flooded eight satellite towns downriver, Roy’s brain provides via automatic mental flashcard. “Besides, she likes you,” Ed continues. “Look, she’s already inside.”

Roy’s gaze snaps to where Ed’s pointing in time to see the last few inches of the snake glide over Roy’s threshold and into the hallway. “Oh f-”

He’s stopped by Ed’s hand suddenly gripping his wrist. “It’s just two weeks, you barely need to do anything, and I’ll owe you a favor,” Ed says steadily, holding Roy’s gaze. His eyes aren’t anywhere near the same virulent yellow as the snake, but Roy’s reminded that under the fluffy mess of Ed’s behaviors, brains and braid there’s a carnivore all the same, and it’s worth Roy’s time and attention. “She’s nice. You’ll see.” 

“...Lady Lugnuts,” Roy says, after some moments. 

“Yeah, y'know. Because Winry likes engines. But also she’s, y’know. A girl,” Ed says, presumably thus presenting the sum total of his insight into femininity. He lets go of Roy’s wrist, leaving a phantom prickle of warmth and calluses. “Winry’s number is in the bag, someone’ll be back to pick her up in two weeks and she better not be a crispy fried snake on a stick when we get here. Okay, bye!” 

And so Roy is left with a water dish, a bag of alchemically freeze-dried rats and the certain knowledge that god is real and personally hates him. He knew that already, of course, but he supposes he can’t fault the world for feeling it necessary to post a reminder. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. The following chapter contains some violence where a big ol snake chokes a dude
> 
> 2\. Ive decided creta is india proxy or expy or whatever its called
> 
> 3\. I did not research snakes or politics nearly enough for the following content to be more than convenient nonsense

On Monday Roy goes to work, signs off on the memo that’ll withhold all grants and subsidiary funding from the War Ministry’s discretionary budget and makes Havoc look up how to get snake urine out of carpeting. Tuesday and Wednesday are one sickly conjoined twin of back to back press conferences as the news gets out and the money doesn’t, and on day four Riza judges the situation worsened enough to justify armed escorts on Roy’s trips to and from work. This puts a crimp in his morning muffin habit, because Lieutenant Khozhaq is very intent on trying to convince him to let him taste it for poison first. General Teylan Jenness toasts Roy with her latte from across the HQ entry hall before heading off to the judicial wing; as his co-sponsor of the initial antitrust legislation she’s got her own armed escort, and since she’s no alchemist hers stays with her in the building. 

On day five, he’s reminded that he’s cohabitating with a _fucking snake_ when he staggers into his kitchen at eleven at night and nearly hurls his meatball sandwich at the demon tentacle that rises questioningly from beneath the radiator. 

“Fuck me sideways,” Roy manages. It flickers its tongue at him. When it lowers its head and starts gliding closer, it occurs to Roy that he hasn’t fed the thing in five days. He hurriedly puts down his sandwich and pulls the dead rat bag out of his freezer. 

The rat he extracts - via chopsticks that he drops in the trash immediately - takes time to thaw. Roy spends the time eating his meatball sandwich and walking in circles around his ground floor, because the snake continues to move glacially but inevitably towards the smell of him, or perhaps just the meatballs. He also soon regrets trashing the chopsticks, as it means he has to fish out another pair to take the soggy rat out of the sink and drop it in front of the snake. 

He barely gets out of the way in time. Its head stills, its tongue flickers, and then it’s lunging with its whole face split open towards the rat. Roy decides he will be finishing his sandwich upstairs. 

He’s halfway through dialing Riza to complain in a very lighthearted and fun and not at all hysterical manner before he realizes he hasn’t even told her about the snake. He rewinds through the past five days and realizes with the exception of Havoc he hasn’t told _anyone_ about the snake, and even then he didn’t exactly _tell_ Havoc anything. Havoc hadn’t even asked why he needed to know about snake urine, which is less an indicator of Havoc’s unquestioning nature and more to do with the breadth of absolutely insane shit Roy’s asked his team to look into over the years. 

He finishes dialing. He tells Riza. She shakes the line with silent laughter for ten minutes, stops by to see the damn thing and feeds it another thawed rat. A nice Friday evening. Animal corpses, sandwich stalking, an eighteen foot reptile unhinging its jaw to acquire two disturbingly whole lumps in its middle. 

On day six Roy discovers Lady Lugnuts can open doors. He discovers this as a consequence of waking up to find the snake _in his bed_ , and he is beyond sure he closed his bedroom door that evening. The snake is in his bed. The snake is in. His bed. The snake is more and more in his bed with every passing moment, because it’s still sliding its slow, heavy body up the side of the mattress to join its head. Which is currently snuggling Roy’s kneecap. 

"Ma’am. Please stop," Roy says, in a tone of voice that has never worked on any woman he has ever known but somehow persists in coming out during times of crisis anyway. This is not the first time he’s woken up with a snake having decided he’s its nighttime personal heater, but again, _those_ snakes were _twenty inches long._

Roy breathes. Constricting snakes don’t strike slow. The strangulation itself may take a while, but the initial bite doesn’t. The fact that the snake is currently in the process of bunching up on his thigh almost certainly means that it’s just seeking warmth, not coiling to launch itself into his face and turn him into a hundred and seventy pounds of midnight yummies. Slowly, carefully, he moves his hand from beneath the sheet and down his body until his fingertips make contact with dry scales. 

It’s not that Roy’s afraid of snakes. Snakes are not the problem. Any animal can be a threat; if you don’t know the temperament of the neighbor’s dog, don’t try to pet it. It’s a potentially volatile unknown, in his house, _in his bedroom,_ and he can’t reason with it, can’t make it understand it’s in its best interests to never designate him dinner. 

Alright, maybe snakes are a little bit the problem. You can _train_ a dog. 

Something flickers briefly over his knuckles. Roy can only assume it’s the tongue. He thinks longing of the brandy in the locked drinking cabinet downstairs and slowly turns his hand over, closing his fingers carefully over the snake’s neck. Insofar as there can be a neck on something that’s all neck to begin with. Slowly, he moves his hand up to just under the snake’s head; it provides an illusion of control, at least, that he’ll be able to prevent it from biting him. He doesn’t exert any pressure, and in exchange it doesn’t seem to mind. 

It also doesn’t stop slithering up onto his mattress. 

“It’s summer,” Roy tells the darkness of his bedroom ceiling, hearing the futility in his own voice. “It’s not even cold outside. Or inside. Why are you doing this to me.” 

Lady Lugnuts, commonly called Luggage, gathers all eighteen feet of herself onto Roy’s bed and proceeds to make herself comfortable. 

This involves a lot of making Roy uncomfortable, and at one point necessitates him placing a pillow over his groin. He discovers there is no happy medium between getting her to settle both away from his face and away from his balls. She finally curls up in an endless switchback along his ribs and thigh, head somewhere back down around his kneecap, and is not even slightly restful.

But she isn’t actively trying to bite him, or strangle him, or otherwise turn him into dinner, so really, that makes her rather less dangerous than anyone Roy has been interacting with on a daily basis these past few months, so his reactions are frankly completely irrational. 

“I’m going to skin Edward alive,” Roy decides is his coping mechanism, and tries to get back to sleep. 

This sets the tone for the weekend. He’s strictly out of office for the next two days, which means he only gets nine phone calls and two updated paper briefings delivered, one by Riza and one by harried military courier. Once the snake has discovered that he is a heat source that often stays in place for hours at a time - in bed, in his study, on the couch - her primary goal in life becomes to assert herself into his lap by any means possible. "Your feelings are unrequited," he tells her hourly, trying to read up on how to become undesirably cold and clammy without becoming a corpse. She does not heed him. 

On Monday he gets to escape to work - a rare feeling that he treasures all too briefly - and after a morning of interminable briefings he meets with the Cretan military liaison for what’s nominally a paperwork exchange. Given the past year of negotiations has seen them to a first-name basis, however, it usually turns into lunch. “More popular than ever, I see,” Bhagwati says when she sees him; Riza has decided his armed escort will also be staying with him in the building this week. 

“Lieutenants Khozhaq and Parles,” Roy introduces, gesturing which is which as they both salute, then switches to Cretan to say “In or out?” His accent is terrible, but it’s not going to improve by speaking Amestrisan. 

“My offices today, I think,” Bhagwati decides, and they fall into step as they exit Command and head across the esplanade towards Embassy Row. 

Conversation stays superficial to the gates of the Cretan embassy, through the front building and out to the now familiar mazelike courtyard gardens. They discovered early on that they have similar diplomatic philosophies, namely that you catch more flies with honey and that if you start nice you can always be nasty later, which was a pleasant surprise given he’s fairly sure Bhagwati was appointed the emissary to Amestris specifically to match his own promotion. While Creta hasn’t been in half the wars Amestris has over the past thirty years it certainly hasn’t been without conflict, and she didn’t get the scar splitting her nostril from signing paperwork. She’s not the only hardline veteran to have taken the stage since Roy became the right hand of the Amestrisan armed forces, either. His reputation as a politically apathetic playboy didn’t make it outside Amestris, but his reputation as the Hero of Ishval definitely did, and a human weapon helming the Ministry of War sends a certain message to neighboring countries. 

It’s been a bit of a problem. It can be useful to be taken seriously right off the bat, but when Roy’s trying to broker if not peace then at least ceasefire it’s a little unhelpful for the other side to know him solely as a frontline grunt whose promoting qualifications began and ended with being a bloodthirsty human bomb. 

He’s been very lucky with Bhagwati Kakadia. She doesn’t rely on assumptions. And given Creta’s busy dealing with its own internal problems - civil war within the next six months or Roy will eat his socks - she wants to go to war with Amestris about as much as Roy does. Possibly less than he does, given that the Promised Day is widely accepted to have been some kind of alchemical weapons test gone wrong - or, given that Central _didn’t_ sink into a bubbling crater despite the fact that everyone in the country temporarily died for eighty seconds, gone horribly right. 

So every country on the continent is spying like hell and leaning hard on their own weapons development, because _they_ all think what the homunculi tried to do to Amestris is what Amestris is planning to do to _them._ The fact that Grumman has been signing armistices left and right over the past five years has calmed down the initial panic some, but, well. First you work on your reputation, then your reputation works on you. 

So thank fuck for Bhagwati and the occasional lunches of sanity. “I applaud your trick,” she comments in Amestrisan as they sit down at their usual low table, her aide neatly placing the latest folder of border checkpoint agreements next to Roy’s chai. “Withholding dispense of your discretionary budget as a compliance tactic. I will have to remember it.” 

“A temporary measure,” Roy says in an appropriately regretful tone, picking up the folder and flipping through. “Until Parliament sorts out the appropriate legislation we can’t just blindly trust that the money will be used appropriately. These are taxpayers’ cenz, after all. We have a responsibility.” 

“And you take your people seriously.” 

“It would be counterintuitive not to,” Roy agrees. He’s also fairly sure Bhagwati’s been shipped here to keep her from consolidating power back home, which, well. She wants a treaty that will oblige Amestris to provide military aid if war is declared on the Cretan Federation, and if southern Creta does secede she will be the General who secured the military advantage that allows them victory. And if they don’t go to war, it’ll be because suddenly there’s a lot of money to be made selling fruits to the freaks across the border, so all you farmers picking up those rebel weapons better get back to your fields and get rich quick. Which is a deal Roy is also happy to hand her, given it’s exactly what he wants and the Amestrisan agricultural minister is a bigoted seventy-four year old drunk; good company isn’t the only reason they started having these lunches. 

Bhagwati smiles at Lieutenant Parles, currently awkwardly refusing a selection of drinks from one of the embassy staff. “The guards are necessary?”

“Amestrisans are a direct people,” Roy says, scanning the checkpoint agreement. “They tend to express their displeasures directly. Especially where money is involved. And as you said, I take the Amestrisan people very seriously.” 

They do demand it. Sometimes Amestrisan demilitarization feels about as reachable as the moon, but given some hopped-up extradimensional freak tried it the literal way and in the process established an entire functional country, there’s no reason Roy shouldn’t try. Any big task is just a lot of small ones. They need better relationships with their neighbors than “war”, which means trade deals, which means breaking up some of their domestic cartels; Amestris has the edge on steel production and in fact anything requiring metallurgy, but while they do fine on potatoes and grain only a small portion of South grows the kind of varied fresh fruits and vegetables that are freely available in Creta and Aerugo. So they need to make price fixing illegal, sell Amestrisan steel cheap and give Creta favourable terms for exporting their mangos and pineapples and terrifying brown hairy things he’d been told were called kiwi, so that Cretans don’t have incentive to develop their own metallurgy while also having something profitable for their farmers to do. 

Make war unprofitable. Make it undesirable. Make it inconvenient. Make Amestris so intertwined in trade and industry and innovation that the money made by peace far outweighs any possible profit in war. Layer in treaties, open the borders, nationalize the railways and set the alchemists to working construction and medicine and energy grids. It _can_ be done. But the status quo is rooted deep, and this omelet won’t cook without cracking the hell out of more than a couple eggs. Well, fine. Roy loves his criminal country like the bitterest of divorcees and it’s time to roll some heads. 

So one thing at a time. If there’s a secret agreement between, say, the mines and the steel mills, and that agreement means that certain weapons and consumer goods manufacturers have favourable terms while construction manufacturers are effectively blocked from accessing the certain grades of steel and other materials, why, that should be _very illegal._ Making things illegal, of course, is the purview of Parliament, as the state military doesn’t make the laws, only enforces them. Parliament - largely in response to the military’s pretty much constant executive overreach - has long been composed of industry barons who are not interested in changing the status quo. But officers ranked General and above can sponsor legislation, and as Minister of War Roy can smile, take his frankly obscene discretionary budget and sit on it until the relevant bullshit is outlawed. No contracts, no subsidies, no grants. The new fiscal year starts next Thursday and if they want to see a dime they’ll pass the bill Jenness put to the floor last Friday afternoon. 

“Do you keep dogs, Roy?” 

“Not home enough to feed one,” Roy says absently, flipping pages. 

“Ah. I forget you Amestrisans rarely keep servants either. Though there are advantages to hungry dogs as well, in the home.” 

Roy glances up briefly to smile. “I fear if I did keep dogs I would spoil them too awfully to expect of them any work.”

“Soft-hearted,” Bhagwati remarks in the amused tone of voice that means she thinks him nothing of the sort. “Perhaps for your next promotion we will gift you Kharit dogs and a keeper.” 

A Cretan spy and a pretense for them to spy on, she means. “I would be honored by such generosity,” Roy says vaguely. They can spy on whatever they want in his house, he doesn’t do anything worth reporting on in there. He actually finds himself half thinking he’d almost welcome the company, and immediately resolves to get a massage or get laid or something as soon as possible to correct matters. “Until then I will have to trust to human work.” 

“Until your law is passed.” Bhagwati picks idly at one of the flaky potato pastries; Roy’s still not sure if she never eats much at these meetings because she’s mirroring him or because she also just doesn’t like a heavy lunch. “In the meantime you are arresting the…” She briefly switches to Amestrisan, “Inside traders?”

“That is the purview of the Justice ministry. We will of course supply extra personnel if necessary, but only if General Jenness requests them.” 

“Oh, of course.” Bhagwati ladles sauce onto her pastry and offers him the pot. “Yogurt?” 

They eat. Roy finishes the document - Bhagwati made it clear some time ago that multitasking not only isn’t rude, it’s expected, and at that moment Roy had briefly considered marriage - and a fruit salad. All the language in the papers seems to check out, hasn’t been changed from the working drafts, but he’s going to hand this off to the translation team just in case to make sure; everything else seems to be in order. 

He stacks the pages back into the file, looking up. “Bhagwati? Import-export tariffs are next. Pass my compliments to the Agricultural Minister, would you? Tell him those oranges he sent were delicious and we would love to see more. As well as… whatever it was I just ate.” 

“The pink thing or the green thing?” 

“The pink thing.” 

“Ah, grapefruit. Bitter.” 

“Just as I like it.” 

“You would, yes.” 

They smile, they bow, they part, and Roy spends the rest of the day locked in with two Brigadier Generals from West who personally hate him almost as much as they hate each other. Both have a litany of complaints a mile wide, but not a single one to do with steel grades, fruit, or trade unions, so Roy lets the tooth-gritted diatribes wash over him in something like bliss. He goes home, he showers, he manages not to scream when he opens the curtain and finds the fucking snake poking its head through the door like an inquisitive puppy, only with none of the fur or paws or charm. 

That night Roy wakes to a gunshot, then a choking sound, then something heavy falling onto his mattress and starting to thrash. Roy flips himself off the opposite side, hits the floor, and claps to create a halogen-diode reaction that sets off a flare near the ceiling that floods the room with blinding light. The sounds of struggle don’t stop, but nobody’s shooting, and Roy swipes up to snag a glove off the nightstand and hit the bedside lamp switch. 

Lady Lugnuts is wrapped around a man, yellow coils stark against his dark clothing, strangling him like she instinctively strangles the rat corpses Roy drops for her. There’s a clatter - the man’s thrashing leg kicked his dropped pistol off the bed. He’s struggling hard, clearly panicked, one hand clawing at her scales, but the other arm is trapped to his chest - she got him in the neck, Roy sees, landing the initial pinning bite, and she’s still coiling, crushing down at his ribs and face and abdomen. 

Roy grabs the pistol, ignoring the sounds behind him as he rolls to his feet and checks the windows, the hall, the stairwell for a partner, one hand poised to snap and the other leading with the gun. No one else is upstairs, so he gets back to the bedroom, ejecting the magazine and clearing the chamber to pocket the pistol. The hitman has stopped moving. The snake has not. 

On the one hand, getting her off him removes all Roy’s trepidation about handling her via the first thirty seconds of extremely condensed exposure therapy. On the other hand, she is deeply unhappy with his efforts and proves impossible to budge. The man’s face is turning blue. Roy grits his teeth, activates the circle on his glove and pulls the oxygen away from the snake’s face and towards the hitman’s. 

It takes several seconds. Lady goes limp. The hitman _stays_ limp despite the lack of constriction, so Roy ends the transmutation and unwinds Lady from the man as quickly as possible. She starts to stir again even as he loosens the last loop, so he hurriedly scoops her up, piles her on his bed and wraps her in his topsheet, knotting the top as quickly and tightly as he dares. 

Makeshift snake prison taken care of, he returns to the prone hitman. He’s wheezing, his breath rattling in his chest in a way that probably means there’s internal damage, but he’s alive if totally unresponsive. There’s nothing in his pockets, nothing identifying whatsoever, not that Roy was expecting anything. This wouldn’t have been staged to look like a suicide, not with this timing - he’d be expected to be found shot dead, messily, a message sent the most old-fashioned way possible. 

Roy has deadbolts on all the doors and uses them, but a sufficiently motivated individual with time, tools and experience would not find it impossible to enter this house. Riza had judged the greatest threat to be in transit, seeing as he mostly walks to and from work, and that he’s famous enough as a war alchemist that anyone trying to off him would consider long range fire their best bet; Roy had thought that enough. Lazy. Sloppy. Absolute luck that the snake was here, that the hitman was startled enough to fire wide, that Roy woke up in time. 

Being a General means he can’t just slit the man’s throat and incinerate his body in the bathtub. Not that that would be wise in any case: if the man lives he can give testimony as to his employers. Roy calls Riza instead. 

“My tenant caught a rat,” he says, only slightly breathless. “Well, I say rat. Usually rats don’t carry nine millimeter TTKs.” 

“Caught?” Riza says sharply. “Alive?” 

“For the moment.” 

“I’ll start the calls.” 

She hangs up. Roy dials an ambulance, and explains to the dispatcher that his friend had some kind of seizure, seems to have hurt himself and might be having trouble with his lungs. 

Upon coming back into the bedroom, he finds Luggage has escaped the bedsheet, returned to the floor, swallowed the assassin’s outflung arm up to the shoulder and is by all appearances happy to lay there and try to digest it. _“Why,”_ Roy says despairingly, and gets to undoing _that_ fresh hell. 

It takes longer to pull the arm out than it did to get Luggage off the man in the first place, partially because Roy’s trying not to hurt her and partially because it’s wildly fucking gross. He discovers that snakes have saliva, or at least this one sure as hell does, and while she only tries to snap at him once she is once again deeply uncooperative with his efforts. Roy _finally_ drags the man’s limp hand free, heaves Luggage back onto the mattress and tangles the sheets around her as best he can again. Then he reactivates the array on his glove, and resumes concentrating oxygen around the unconscious man’s mouth and nose. 

The window of time to decide how he wants to proceed will close when the paramedics get here. Admitting to an assassination attempt that got as far as successful home invasion is not going to paint him in a position of strength, regardless of who actually won the fight. Conversely, a single gunshot in a wealthy neighborhood at night isn’t _that_ hard to spin. Neither is a single ambulance, even if accompanied by a few soldiers. Riza won’t be bringing the whole cavalry down. Just as well. Explaining what the fuck happened here to her alone is going to be enough of a problem. 

He looks down at Luggage, who is even now attempting escape from her sheet bundle. Shutting her in the bathroom or the guest room is not an option, as she can turn the door handles and there’s no fucking way Roy’s letting her out of his sight. 

There’s nothing for it. As the siren and flashing lights approach up Roy’s street, he bends down, picks Luggage up again and winds her around his shoulders. 

Riza shows up with Lieutenant Khozhaq’s squad ten seconds behind the ambulance, which is fortunate timing given Roy is in his pajamas with a giant fucking snake wrapped around him and can’t impose a de facto gag order simply by flashing the stars on his lapel. Riza’s not in uniform but the rest are, and Lieutenant Khozhaq immediately directing his men to surround the house and enter through both front and back doors is enough of a military signifier that the paramedics only give him some startled double takes as they jog in after. 

“Clear, sir,” Khozhaq reports when he comes back, his gaze stuck entirely to the snake squeezing resentfully at Roy’s waist and arm. “That’s. Is that, uh -” 

“Her name is Lady,” Roy says, vaguely impressed with how sane he sounds. “She’s staying with me for the moment.” 

“A seizure, huh,” one paramedic says grimly, not looking up as she finishes strapping the unconscious assassin to the stretcher. “And I’m guessing there’ll be -” her gaze flickers once to Roy, to the snake wound around him from neck to knee, then away. “A military escort, to show us where to take him.” 

“Central North hospital,” Riza says calmly. “Just where you’d take anyone. We will stay with you, as he will need protective custody once he’s left the emergency room.” 

“I’ll bet,” someone mutters in the crowd of uniforms. 

Luggage takes that moment to wriggle her neck out of Roy’s grip and hiss, presumably to communicate that as the crowning indignity on a night full of disappointments she is now fed up with being a boa on his shoulders. That starts to clear the room in a hurry, and only accelerates things when Roy unwinds her off himself and places her on the floor. “We’ll, uh,” Lieutenant Khozhaq says, eyes now glued downward, “take positions outside?” 

“Peters, Varan, Anje, with me,” Riza orders. “We’ll call when we reach the hospital. The rest of you stay with the General.”

“Yes,” Roy agrees, because if he’s going to have a shit three in the morning he may as well have it in company. “You can help me with the dead rats in my freezer.” 

“Rats,” Lieutenant Khozhaq says, probably more weakly than he’d like. 

“Oh yes,” Roy says, finding it costs no part of him at all to stick his leg out and use his ankle to prevent Luggage from following the paramedics out of the bedroom with their stretcher. “It’s not like she got to finish her dinner.”

-o-

Riza arrives with the rest of his escort at seven sharp the next morning, showing no signs of having been up all night, and joins Roy in the backseat of the car. “What are you going to ask Edward to do?” she asks as they pull into traffic. “For your favor.” 

“Something unforgivable,” Roy mutters. He hasn’t slept either, not that he could with four soldiers hovering over him all night, and left Lady on his living room floor, digesting four rats that she’d snapped up with a distinctly sullen aura of settling for second best. A muffin is not going to cover this.

“He’s going to spin this as you owing him,” Riza observes. 

“Spin this? I’m going to spin _him,”_ Roy swears. “On a spit, over open flame, until he’s crispy in all directions. And then I am going to salt him, and pour on lemon juice, and ship him to Creta in a box with a bow on top when Bhagwati asks for that inevitable damn alchemical exchange program. She can eat him alive with extra chutney and spit the bones back when she’s done.”

“There’s an idea,” Riza says, in an unusually thoughtful voice. 

Roy huffs, settling back into the seat. “They’re six months out from civil war.” 

“Edward likes new experiences.” 

“And travel,” Roy says, eyeing her askance.

“He’s a very capable individual. I’m sure he’d jump at the chance, if you offered him state-sponsored tickets.” 

Roy narrows his eyes at her. Knowing exactly what she’s doing doesn’t make it less effective. “Not Creta.” 

“Just as you say, sir,” Riza says mildly, and they pull into the HQ garage. 

When Roy enters the office there’s a box of massive golden oranges on his desk, along with an inch-thick stack of paper that turns out to be a guide to fresh Cretan produce, complete with charming little color photographs and accompanying bulk prices. There’s also a note from Bhagwati, in Cretan, that just says _I had not realized the Kharit words for dog and snake were so similar._

Roy scrawls back _Oops_ in Amestrisan, tosses it back in the Out tray and goes to tell Falman and Fuery to take the oranges and the prices down to the Ministry of the Interior and get a counterproposal out of them by end of day tomorrow. He also mentions that the Cretan delegation was kind enough to mention they have some talkative people in their orbit, and that it would be nice to find out whether it was the paramedics, Roy’s neighbors or someone on his security detail that was so happy to share last night’s adventure with a foreign national. 

His next stop would usually be Maes’ office, but Maes is in Emmell in a charming lakeside cabin teaching Elysia to canoe for six more days and Gracia had expressed how relaxing it’d be for him to _really_ get away from work for a change. Maes’ 2IC is fine - Colonel Fia Fatohem, young but pleasantly vicious, thinks Riza walks on water - but she’s not Maes, and in any case visiting Intelligence is usually one part information exchange to nine parts ranting. 

Instead, he drops the custody documents for the would-be assassin in Fia’s in tray, orders “Find out who hired him, then give me enough background to burn a hole in their lives and fuck them through it,” and in response to her dirty look adds one of the especially big Cretan oranges to the top of the paperwork. 

“Fuck off, sir,” she tells him cordially, and he twiddles his fingers and heads off to another fucking press briefing. Time to find out whether his communications director is going to decide if it’s more advantageous to “leak” photographs of him toting a giant maneating snake or engineer an entirely new scandal to drown them out. 

By four Havoc sticks his head in to report that Jerry from Signalling said that Zhara from Treasury heard from Walters in Transport who said Boyin in Medical Corps got told that Roy feeds live political prisoners in his in-home depravity dungeon to his pet mammoth cobra, which is twenty feet long and more venomous than the blue-ringed octopus. “Which is apparently super venomous,” Havoc concludes. “Though not because of the blue rings? The rings don’t have anything to do with it, they’re just there.” His brow wrinkles in a way that conveys that he finds this nomenclature to be silly, misinformative and entirely missing the point when it comes to naming animals that can kill you. “Should I tell them it’s all true?” 

“She’s only eighteen feet, and not venomous at all,” Roy corrects. “Though frankly she doesn’t need it.” 

“Right,” Havoc says resignedly. “Man-eating snake basement is a go. I’ll add that it’s where junior officers spend their leadership mentoring weekend if they're bad, how about that.” 

“In my sex dungeon?” Roy says skeptically. 

“Where else?” 

“I haven’t got that kind of room,” Roy informs him, but Havoc’s already sloping out the door. 

“Great,” Roy mutters, and resigns himself to a press conference where he will officially have to deny hosting bestiality themed sex parties for his subordinates in his basement sex dungeon. And they say there are no perks to working in government. 

-o-

When Edward comes to pick up his Luggage, it’s with Alphonse and Winry Rockbell in tow. “The fuck’s with the third degree?” Ed opens with when Roy answers the door. “Motherfuckers at the gate wanted to see two forms of ID - you _know_ me, Peters! You’ve known me since you were a fucking Corporal and my voice hadn’t even cracked! Two pieces of ID my _ass!”_ He turns back to Roy. “What the fuck have you done now? Is Hawkeye mad at you? Are those dudes in your bushes _supposed_ to be there?”

“We like the landscaping,” comes Sergeant Shetner’s voice, somewhat muffled. 

Roy doesn’t bother giving Ed a facial expression. “They like the landscaping.”

“Is everything alright, General?” Alphonse says politely. 

“Oh, fine.” Roy gestures them to come inside before the neighbors start setting up their long-range photography equipment. “We’ve just had an eventful little week recently, is all.” 

“I’ll fuckin’ bet,” Ed says sardonically, tromping into Roy’s house and glancing around like he’s expecting Roy to have hidden Luggage in a shoebox or something. “Thirty foot long people-eating dragon viper, huh?” 

“I really don’t think that was true, Ed,” Rockbell says, in the weary tones of one who’s been repeating it for the past hour. “Anyway, she’s not even big enough to _try_ to swallow a person.” 

“She managed an arm,” Roy says.

Rockbell looks alarmed, and it probably says something that she’s the first person in Roy’s orbit to do so over this entire situation. “What? What happened? Are you alright?” 

“Oh, it wasn’t my arm,” Roy says with levity that he probably shouldn’t feel given its similarity to adrenaline giggles. “I had an uninvited visitor a few nights ago. Unrelatedly - Ms. Rockbell, if given the chance, your snake will one hundred percent try to eat people. I felt you should know.” 

“Holy fuck, Mustang, did you feed her at _all?”_ Ed demands. “I _gave_ you the rats.” 

“And she ate them. They had no effect whatsoever on her taste for human flesh.” 

“I can’t believe you,” Ed marvels. “I leave a nice housebroken pet with you for _two weeks_ and you have her _eating people.”_

“I _stopped_ her eating people.”

“You let her _try!_ How do you fuck up _petsitting?”_

“Petsitting? You made me a warden to an eighty pound homicidal toddler who can _open doors,_ Edward -“ 

“Well you did such a great job with me, I thought this would be a cakewalk for you,” Ed says, like it’s _Roy’s_ fault his girlfriend’s snake tried to kill a man one time and wants nothing more than to taste human blood again. 

Roy decides it is not in his best interest to respond to that and smiles at Alphonse and Rockbell instead. “Please, make yourselves at home. Lady Lugnuts is in the kitchen. Or possibly the living room. Or any room in the house, really. I’m going to make some calls and then try to fill the bathtub with enough gin to drown in.”

He goes to do exactly that, leaving them in his front hall; he can’t find it in himself to care if the three of them destroy his house unsupervised at this point. This is clearly the universe telling him it’s time to book a three hour massage session where if he tips enough they’ll kill and dispose of any military attache that goes trying to find him for some very urgent matter. Thank fuck one of the Christmas cousins decided drag was nice and all but what he really wanted to do was start a spa business. 

Despite being in the upstairs studio when he dials, Roy can still hear the squeal when presumably Rockbell finds her pet. “Aww! Lady-baby! Look at youuuu! Who’s an invasive species! Who's an invasive species that's too lazy to leave the house or procreate! Who's a sweet baby apex predator!” 

“Are you talking to Ed?” Alphonse says, sounding amused. 

Rockbell snorts. “Oh please. Ed’s not an apex anything. He activates little old ladies’ prey drive, he’s like an exposed lemming on the tundra. Who’s a sweet banana baby! You are!” 

The line connects. “Ideal Image Medical Spa, this is Tanzie!”

“Hi, it’s me,” Roy says over the sounds of increasingly hick accents communing with the reptile in his kitchen. “Book me with Sven?” 

“Ooo, that bad?” Tanzie says wincingly. 

“You haven’t seen the papers?” 

“We never believe the papers, horsie, you know that. I’ve got a full morning on Tuesday, how’s that?” 

“Perfect,” Roy decides. Fuck his staff meeting. In fact fuck his every meeting, he never wants to come in to work again. “Out of curiosity, for how long do you think he can put me in a medical coma?” 

“I’m sure he’ll do his best,” Tanzie says sympathetically. “But I just don’t think aromatherapy can get you over a day or so.” 

“No one will give me what I want in this country,” Roy says gloomily. “Thank you, Tanzie.” 

There’s a crash from downstairs. “Mustang?” Ed yells. “Yo, where do you keep your cleaning stuff? Luggage pooped on the rug.” 

Roy leans his forehead against the wall and closes his eyes. “Wooooow,” Tanzie says slowly, the trademark Elric bellow clearly having reached her. “Good times in the state-sponsored weekend getaway sex dungeon, huh?”

“I thought you didn’t believe the papers.”

“Oh, we don’t. See you Tuesday!” 

When Roy gets downstairs Alphonse and Rockbell are busy folding Luggage into a plastic tub they definitely didn’t have with them when they came in, while Ed scrubs at Roy’s living room rug on all fours. Roy makes for the coffee machine instead of the drinks cabinet only through truly heroic effort of will, whereupon he discovers that Ed isn’t using the rug cleaner Roy made Havoc buy, he’s just using vinegar and baking soda. 

He stares at the mess on the counter for a while, then takes the rug cleaner from under the sink, goes back to the living room and lets it thunk between Ed’s shoulderblades. 

“Hey!”

“You owe me,” Roy informs him. “Stop pouring vinegar on my carpets. Use this instead.” 

“What?” Ed twists to squints up at him through his bangs, catching the cleaner as it slides off his back. “You want _this_ as your favor?” 

Roy starts laughing in what he finds is genuine amusement, which he hadn’t known was in the cards for him today. “This? Oh, no,” he says. _“This_ is part of you taking the animal back. When I need something from you worth these past two weeks with your snake, rest assured, I will come and collect.”

With that he heads back to his coffee, or at least what will be his coffee once he assembles it. The world may be a magnificent pile of shit, but it’s not all bad. Sometimes you have revenge to look forward to. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MUSTANG’S PARTY WEEKEND? “CO-EDS” SEEN LEAVING GENERAL’S MANSION
> 
> “Oh thank fuck,” says Roy’s communications director. “We finally killed the sex dungeon snake story.” 
> 
> “And I didn’t even have to sleep with another General’s wife,” Roy says, eyeing PENCHANT FOR BLONDS WELL-KNOWN. 
> 
> “That was only one of the options we gave you,” the director says irritably. “For fuck’s sake. Give a man anything he wants and he’ll complain it’s the wrong fucking color.” 
> 
> “I don’t want to sleep with any Generals’ wives,” Roy points out, not for the first time. 
> 
> “And that’s my problem? Gods, you’re fucking impossible to work with sometimes.”

**Author's Note:**

> THERE IS ART!!
> 
> [SNOODLES](https://tinfigs.tumblr.com/post/621520965073027072/snoodles-snake-doodles-inspired-by)
> 
> [Lady Lugnuts!](https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/50878371?asc=u)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Hotel Californian](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25791271) by [TheWarriorpony](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWarriorpony/pseuds/TheWarriorpony)




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